moonbat A knee-jerk liberal, short for barking moonbat; a derogation by kneejerk
conservatives—or wing nuts, as they,
in turn, are derided by moonbats.

From a 2006 profile in The Washington
Post of NBC's White House correspondent,
David Gregory: "At Free Republic, another
conservative site, a poster said: 'This barking
moonbat is just mad because he realizes
there is no way to turn this into a "Get
Bush" or even "Get Cheney" scandal.'"
Vinay Menon, slamming a reality TV show,
Wanted Ted or Alive, in the Toronto Star in 2006, put the insult in flavorful context:
"The show is not for everybody. Specifically,
vegans, liberals, gun-control advocates,
vegetarians, pansies, evolutionists, elites,
sophisticates, urban snobs, atheists, tree-huggers,
feminists, Germans, useful idiots,
moonbats, multiculturalists, and profanity-averse
viewers are advised to proceed with
caution."

Moonbat was introduced as an epithet by
Perry de Haviland in 1999 and popularized
in the blogosphere, starting in 2002, on de
Haviland's libertarian Web site, Samizdata. De Haviland has rejected
the suggestion that moonbat was inspired
by the surname of George Monbiot, a proenvironmental
columnist for the Manchester
(U.K.) Guardian. "I coined the term
long before George came onto my radar,"
he wrote in a 2006 e-mail message. "I rendered
the term as 'Barking Moonbat' as
part of a conversation I was having with
some friends about how when certain topics
appear in the media or on the internet,
some people start howling just like wolves
reflexively at the visual stimuli. However
as wolves seems too noble a connotation,
I started to describe the reflex as 'the Barking
Moonbat reflex.'"

De Haviland thought of moonbat as an
"ecumenical" term of abuse, applicable
equally to "dogmatists of any ilk, left, right,
or libertarian," but coiners cannot be choosers. In practice, righties took over moonbat,
using it as a club for beating lefties exclusively. The moon part is key. On account
of its changing phases, earth's satellite has
long been associated with instability—with
insanity in general, and with the "loony left"
in particular. (Loony comes from luna,
Latin for "moon.") Chicago
Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko
played upon the association in 1979 when he
referred to California governor Jerry Brown
as "Governor Moonbeam." The label stuck
because of Brown's perceived eccentricities,
but Royko took it all back in a 1991 column,
saying that he had thought at the time
it was an "amusing phrase" but "if he had to
do it over again, he sure as hell wouldn't."

Moonbat had prior, nonpolitical incarnations. Aviation buffs adopted it as the nickname
of an experimental nighttime fighter,
the XP-67, developed by McDonnell Aircraft
during World War II. Only one of the planes
was ever built and it was not called the
Moonbat at the time. The name came later,
popularized by aviation buffs, according to
Lawrence Merritt, archivist and historian for
Boeing. "The plane had an unusual body. ...
Some folks thought it looked like a bat and
it was supposed to fly at night. That's where
they must have dreamed up Moonbat," said
Merritt. The earliest example of the name in
his files come from a December 1973 article
in Wings Magazine, entitled "It Must Have
Been 'Moonbat'" (a play on a lyric in the
1934 pop hit "Moonglow").

Still earlier, Robert Heinlein used moonbat in two sci-fi short stories, "Space Jockey"
and "The Black Pits of Luna," published in
1947 and 1948, respectively. In the first,
Moonbat is the name of a landing craft
employed in a three-stage voyage (anticipating
the multi-stage Apollo missions) to
the moon. In the second, a tour guide on
the moon also serves as scoutmaster of the
Moonbat Patrol.

Moonbat's companion in infamy is wingnut,
not to be confused with the wing nut for fastening screws, the Wingnut who was
a fan of The West Wing TV series or who
roots for the Detroit Red Wings hockey
team, the exotic Caucasian Wing-nut tree,
or Robert "Wingnut" Weaver, the surfer
who starred in the 1994 documentary The
Endless Summer II.

Like moonbat, the political wingnut is an
abbreviation of a longer term, in this case
right-wing nut, where nut, as slang for
the head, has long been used to refer to a
person who is silly, stupid, crazy, or simply
nutty. The shortened wingnut is especially
popular among bloggers, who delight in
abbreviation and who do not always use it
in a strictly pejorative sense. Matt Drudge,
of The Drudge Report, told The Washington
Post in May of 1999 why he regularly
checked conservative websites: "I get to
see how my story is playing among the
wing nuts. This tells me it is going to be a
huge radio thing."

The original right-wing nut is of considerable
antiquity, dating at least to the 1960s,
well before the blogosphere emerged to fan
the fringes. Early examples come from letters
to newspapers. Edward Cowan referred
in a letter to The Austin (Tex.) Statesman on Nov. 1, 1962, to "the emergence within
our borders of right-wing nut-groups which
preach a diplomacy of cloak-and-dagger
and a politics of apocalypse." John Lewis
complained to the Modesto (Calif.) Bee
and News-Herald on Oct. 15, 1965, that the
newspaper's editorials cast too wide a net:
"I am, by being a conservative, automatically
a neo-Fascist, right-wing nut and a
fanatic."

Today, the long and short forms coexist
amicably in print. Scripps Howard columnist
Dale McFeathers used the long form in
2002, reporting that his e-mail on the subject
of bias in the press was "split 50-50 between
those who think I'm a pinko traitor and
those who think I'm a right-wing nut." Slate went with the short form in a December
2003 headline for an article on a Supreme
Court case: "The Wing Nut's Revenge: A
Conspiracy Theorist Has His Day in Court."
The anonymous headline writer picked up
on reporter Dahlia Lithwick's observation
that during oral arguments Justice Antonin
Scalia is "never afraid to call a wing nut a
wing nut."

The presumed wing nut in this case was
a California lawyer who wanted to obtain
death-scene photos of Vince Foster, the
Deputy White House Counsel, who committed
suicide in 1993. The legal issue was
whether the right of privacy extended after
death under the Freedom of Information
Act to Foster's family. Scalia joined in the
unanimous opinion that it did.

netroots Liberal wing of the blogosphere,
as contrasted with the slower developing
conservative Rightroots.

"You've heard the story," observed Perry
Bacon, Jr., in Time magazine in September
2006: "the Netroots, the Democratic Party's
equivalent of a punk garage band—edgy,
loud and antiauthoritarian—are suddenly
on the verge of the big time. The gang of
liberal bloggers and online activists who
helped raise millions of dollars for Howard
Dean's presidential campaign two years ago
are now said to be Democratic kingmakers."

Netroots, a portmanteau of Internet and
grassroots, was popularized by Jerome
Armstrong, on his blog, MyDD, starting Dec.
18, 2002, when he went to work on Vermont
governor Howard Dean's presidential campaign.
He headed his entry that day: "Netroots
for Dean in 2004." In his 2006 book,
Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots,
and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, coauthored
with Markos Moulitsas, Armstrong
claims credit for coining the term.
Actually, Armstrong re-invented netroots,
not knowing that it had been used a
decade before. The earliest example that I
have found is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on
the newsgroup bit.listserv.words-l. Apparently
complaining about a shake-up at
the University of California at San Diego,
"rmcdonell" (identified by etymologist Ben
Zimmer as Robert McDonell, a student at
UCSD in the early '90s) wrote: "Too bad
there's no netroots organization that can
demand more than keyboard accountability
from those who claim to be acting on
behalf of the 'greater good' when they do
things like this."

Armstrong insists that netroots does
not have a political coloration: "The term
netroots is ideologically and politically
neutral." Most observers differ. While the
netroots in 2007 may total less than six million
people (Time's estimate), a small number
in national political terms, the sheer
volume of their postings appeared to push
Democratic candidates leftward. Time's
early assessment: "Moderate Democrats
say it with remorse, conservatives with
glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan:
progressive bloggers are pushing the
Democratic Party so far to the left that it
will have no chance of capturing the presidency
in 2008."

Grassroots started off in politics as a populist
term, however, associated with the
"Bull Moose" convention of 1912 and Theodore
Roosevelt's break with the Republican
Party. Today, grassroots is neutral. Over
time, netroots also may gravitate toward
the center.

Islamic terrorists, led by Mohammed
Atta, from a wealthy Saudi family, and
inspired by Osama bin Laden, destroyed
the twin towers of the World Trade Center
in New York City and damaged the Pentagon
in Arlington, Va., by crashing three
hijacked airliners into them, killing about
3,000 people. A fourth airliner, United Flight
93, never reached its target, presumably the
Capitol or White House, after courageous
passengers and crew tried to regain control
of the plane, causing it to crash in a field in
rural Pennsylvania.

9/11 is a metonym—a word or phrase substituted
for another. (Oval Office for President
is another example.) In this instance,
creation of a shorthand term probably was
inevitable, given the complicated nature of
the event (a sequence of attacks on three
buildings in two cities) and its traumatic
psychological impact as well as physical
significance.

People groped for several weeks for a
way to describe what had happened. New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani referred to
the "attack" or "massive attack." President
George W. Bush spoke of "acts of war" and
"mass murder." Three weeks afterward, on
Oct. 3, The Wall Street Journal reported:
"In daily conversations, many people are
resorting to an assortment of vague monikers
to describe the events: 'the terrorist
attacks,' 'the events of Sept. 11,' 'the bombing,'
'the tragedy,' or simply 'it.'"

The date was employed in different
forms within a matter of days to denote
the attacks. Some referred to the events of
9-11-01 or simply to Sept. 11. The United
Way established a September 11th Fund for
disaster relief, while the International Association
of Fire Fighters set up a 9-11 fund
for New York City fire fighters. The New
York Times used 9/11, which came to be the
accepted style for referring to the attacks,
as early as Sept. 12, headlining an Op-Ed
piece by Bill Keller "America's Emergency
Line: 9/11."

The coincidence of the date of the attacks
with the national 911 emergency telephone
number made the metonym as memorable
as the comparable Pearl Harbor for the Japanese
air raid on Dec. 7, 1941, that precipitated
U.S. entry into World War II.

9/11 is an Americanism not picked up
by the rest of the English-speaking world
because U.S. usage puts the number of
the month ahead of the number of the day;
from Britain to Australia, 9/11 signifies not
the 11th day of September but the 9th day
of November. Writers outside the U.S. refer
to "the attacks of 11 September 2001" or
"the World Trade Center attack" (which
leaves out the crash into the Pentagon and
Flight 93).

Why the numeration 9/11 and not Sept.
11, when we still remember Dec. 7 and not
12/7? That is primarily because numbering
has gripped this generation, as Americans
stay open "24/7," not "around the clock all
week long"; secondarily, the rhyming 7/11
is central to a game played with dice and
subsequently was the name adopted by the
7-Eleven chain of convenience stores. "The
compact and catchy rhythm of 9/11 makes
it memorable," Steven Poole, a correspondent
for The Guardian observed to the
author. "If the attacks had occurred on the
23rd of November, I don't think we would
still hear people saying 'eleven twenty-three'
or see '11/23' written. Too many syllables;
not catchy enough. The chance homology
with the U.S. emergency telephone number
gives it an extra frisson, too."

Although terrorist attacks had taken
place years before on U.S. embassies and
the destroyer USS Cole, this stunning surprise,
followed almost immediately by
sweeping national-security legislation, was
seen as the beginning of the war on terror.

pork barrel The public treasury, into
which politicians consumed by prospects
of reelection dip for "pork," or funds for
local projects.

The classic example of the pork barrel is
the Rivers and Harbors bill, a piece of legislation
that provides morsels for scores of
congressmen in the form of appropriations
for dams and piers, highways and bridges.

The trope is derived from the pre-Civil
War practice of periodically distributing
salt pork to the slaves from huge barrels.
A story by E. E. Hale called "The Children
of the Public," which appeared in an 1863
issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
helped popularize the term. In Chapter
I, entitled "The Pork Barrel," Hale wrote:
"We find that, when an extraordinary contingency
arises in life, as just now in ours,
we have only to go to our pork barrel, and
the fish rises to our hook or spear." By the
1870s, congressmen were regularly referring
to "pork," and in 1919 C. C. Maxey
vividly made the analogy in the National
Municipal Review: "Oftentimes the eagerness
of the slaves would result in a rush
upon the pork barrel, in which each would
strive to grab as much as possible for himself.
Members of Congress in the stampede
to get their local appropriation items into
the omnibus river and harbor bills behaved
so much like Negro slaves rushing the pork
barrel, that these bills were facetiously
styled 'pork barrel' bills."

Labor "skates"—a fond old-time term for
union historians—remember the use of the
term pork-chopper in the '30s meaning "fulltime
union leader" or "holder of a political
patronage job." Time magazine noted in
1948 that one New York politician "fished
in Tammany's pork barrel for 28 years to
bring improvement to 'me people.' " In
a Baltimore speech on inflation in 1952,
Adlai Stevenson pledged "no pork-barreling
while our economy is in its present
condition." Former Senator Paul H. Douglas
(D-Ill.) called pork-barrelers "drunkards
who shout for temperance in the intervals
between cocktails."

The practice of channeling federal or
state tax revenues to local projects is
defended as a means of making certain that
improvements in the nation's infrastructure
are directed by local authorities reflecting
the needs of local voters rather than
"Washington bureaucrats." More often,
the porcine image is invoked as an attack
on a system that is later embraced by the
successful attacker. Recent attacks using
other symbols can be found under earmark and bridge to nowhere. Arizona Republican
representative Jeff Flake, asking "And we
wonder why we were beaten like a rented
mule on Tuesday?" after the 2006 elections,
answered, "Pork-barrel earmarks, or 'member
projects' (as we preferred to call them
so as not to offend our own sensibilities)
greatly multiplied under Republican rule.
The Democrats were happy as long as
enough crumbs fell from the Republican
appropriators' table."

realism Originally a foreign policy that
emphasized stability between superpowers
and minimized confrontation to promote
democracy; later, a much different policy
opposing military intervention abroad as
naively idealistic and against the national
interest.

In a 2006 Washington Post column titled
"This Is Realism?" Charles Krauthammer
led with "Now that the 'realists' have ridden
into town gleefully consigning the Bush
doctrine to the ash heap of history, everyone
has discovered the notion of interests,
as if it were some new idea thought up by
James Baker and the Iraq Study Group."
Contrariwise, Tom Ricks wrote in the same
paper: "The Iraq Study Group report might
well be titled 'The Realist Manifesto,'" a
repudiation of the Bush administration's
diplomatic and military approach now being
challenged by recommendations stemming
from "the 'realist' school of foreign policy."

In a 2007 essay in Time magazine headlined
"The Return of the Realists," Walter
Isaacson noted that "the doctrine of realism,
or its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik,
emphasizes a hard-nosed focus on
clearly defined national interests, such as
economic or security goals, pursued with
a pragmatic calculation of commitments
and resources. Idealism, on the other hand,
emphasizes moral values and ideals, such
as spreading democracy."

Pragmatism was the word that proponents
of realism preferred in the Nixon
Administration to define the opening to
Communist China and détente with the
Soviet Union, as well as a tolerance for
authoritarian (a euphemism for "dictatorial")
leaders like Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore
who were on our side in the Cold War.

The old realism of the 1960s and '70s
coined "the balance of terror," glorified
"strategic stability" with its "mutual assured
destruction," and derided President Woodrow
Wilson's dream of a "war to end wars"
that would "make the world safe for democracy"
as hopelessly idealistic and naïve—
that is, not pragmatic.

In the 1980s, however, under Ronald Reagan,
it was the word realism's turn to take
a hit: the lexical pendulum swung toward
evocation of America as a "city on a hill," an
embrace of human-rights rhetoric, and the
moral denunciation of an evil empire. Crusading
idealism was in vogue and amoral
realism was passé.

But not for long. In the elder Bush's term
of 1989-93, stability became the byword and
paramount goal of diplomacy, and the idea
of realism (though not yet the word) began
to make a comeback. It peaked in the senior
Bush's 1991 visit to Kiev, just as the Soviet
Union showed signs of coming apart in the
Baltics and Ukrainians sought their freedom
from Moscow rule. Brent Scowcroft,
a retired general who had been a longtime
Kissinger aide in the Nixon era, helped write
a stability-first speech for President George
H. W. Bush on a visit to Kiev that urged
Ukrainians to stay within the Soviet Union
and direly warning of "suicidal nationalism."
This caused a right-wing opinionmonger at
The New York Times to label the outburst of
realism "Chicken Kiev" (and the elder Bush
has not spoken to the author since).

As word and policy, realism had its ups
and down through the two Clinton terms,
1993 through 2000. But in the first term of
Bush II, the "old" realism of Kissinger and
Scowcroft was battered by what the historian
Robert Kagan called "Americans' belief
in the possibility of global transformation—
the 'messianic' impulse." President
Bush called it his "freedom agenda."

Public impatience grew with "the long,
hard slog" in Iraq, however, and that fresh
stock of Wilsonian idealism—reborn in the
Reagan years and reborn yet again in the
younger Bush's administration—fell into
disrepute, not only in liberal and academic
circles and among antiwar activists but as
reflected in public opinion polls and Democratic
victory in the 2006 congressional
elections. Realism came back into oratorical
vogue; the headline in an August 2007
National Observer read "Hot Policy Wonks
for the Democrats: the New Realists." Subhead:
"Neo-Liberalism is Passe, Anti-Idealogues
Surge. Kind of Scowcrofty."

"We are all realists now." That was the
lede of George Packer's article in an April
2007 issue of The New Yorker. "Iraq has
turned conservatives and liberals alike,"
Packer wrote, "into cold-eyed believers in
a foreign policy that narrowly calculates
national interest without much concern for
what goes on inside other countries." Unexpectedly
in a magazine with unabashed
Bush-bashing credentials, Packer offered
a sobering note to triumphalist realists: "At
some point events will remind Americans
that currently discredited concepts such
as humanitarian intervention and nationbuilding
have a lot to do with national
security—that they originated as necessary
evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now,
Kissingerism is king."

That equated realism with Kissingerism,
synonymy that "Henry the K" (who
supported the Iraq war) surely considered
insufficiently nuanced, and reminded the
"new" realists that they had to dissociate
themselves from the "old" realism.

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Comments from our users:

Actually Australians DO call it 9/11 - i guess 11/9 doesn't have the same ring.
But when I ask youngsters what date 'It' happened, they figure it must have been on 9th November. We're hopeless for Americanisms down under.